


Getting Lost to Find You

by EvilSheWhispered



Category: Lost, Person of Interest (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern with Magic, Crossover, Eventual Relationships, Everyone's probably going to end up gay, Jealousy, John Reese is the subbiest sub to ever sub no matter what universe, Leadership dynamics exploration, Micheal Emerson is a dom, Multi, My best Magic Realism Attempt, Other Additional Tags to Be Added, Set somewhere in Season 3 POI, The Island is a new start, This wouldn't leave me alone, Why do I do this to myself, i don't even like magic AUS usually, i think i'm done with whining in the tags, i'm supposed to be writing a book
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-03-31
Updated: 2019-03-31
Packaged: 2019-12-29 19:40:13
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,052
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18300683
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/EvilSheWhispered/pseuds/EvilSheWhispered
Summary: John has seen strange things,he doesn't know what it is but there are things beyond the edge.When the machine starts acting stranger than usual and sends John a picture of Finch and tells him it's not him John can't ignore the string of numbers that go along with it.He doesn't know that his presence will change everything the Island and it's forces had set in motion.





	Getting Lost to Find You

**Author's Note:**

> Look, i'm in a great deal of pain, so much so i've been unable to write. I have been rewatching Lost while bed ridden and this is the first time i've seen it since watching Person of Interest...and this just wouldn't let go. At first i thought "excuse for Reese in the middle of two doms"...but my brain doesn't do pwp apparently, it does story structure analysis and character dynamic shifts with a large side helping of angst and the underlying /need/ for Reese and Finch to have and build a home together.

John listened to Finch in his ear as he stood in line at the tea cart Finch preferred, warm donuts already tucked under his arm. The machine had provided several numbers at once again. However by several, apparently, Finch meant a new precedent in the amount. There had been a steady stream to the computer at the library during the night of people who were, apparently, all in Australia. The machine sending them directly to the computer was another first. They were american citizens, but aside from the whereabouts there was no connection Finch could find and he was already making preparations for Reese to land in Sydney.

It was a calming ritual until Finch started to sound more frustrated and Reese,drinks in hand and cash handed over, started toward the library. “What’s the matter?” He asked to get Finch to talk again instead of huffing and typing at increasingly improbable speeds through the earpiece. “Several of these people have tickets to L.A. too soon for you to use commercial travel. And one of the numbers is already deceased - actually it looks to have been so when we received his number.” Finch explained.

“Well, you said yourself that i forced the Machine to learn when i asked it to help find you. It gave me the number of someone who’d died before it was active. And it’s given us numbers of deceased individuals to point us in the right direction before, like with the serial killer.” Reese didn’t particularly like being reminded of the case, Finch had once again been in the line of fire - though it’d been his own doing, having decided to fly to an island in the middle of a storm to tell John marginally important information he’d already figured out on his own even after having asked Carter to deliver it. Up until Finch had ended up in a garage with a gun pointed at him John had thought the whole thing was rather endearing and assumed Finch just got restless at times too.

“There’s something else, John. The machine just sent me…well, a warning.” Finch sounded puzzled and reluctant to elaborate, the way he tended to be when not having an answer to a question he knew was going to be asked. So instead of asking about why the machine would send numbers it didn’t wish them to investigate he asked “What did the machine send?” instead. The line was quiet for several minutes while Reese sat in the back of a taxi with the slowly cooling food. “It...I’ve arranged for a flight for you with a private company that will take you to sydney as soon as you are ready to depart. When i had arranged your travel the machine sent a message to my phone. It says ‘stay’.” Reese pulled out one of the donut holes he’d specified with the mixed box and ate it despite the cabbie’s disapproving glance as he thought over the continuously mounting oddities. He waited until the cabbie had pulled off at one of his several usual corners he walked to the library from and had paid the man before he addressed Finch again. 

“Are you sure this is all the machine?” Finch’s voice was cool with steel undertone that spoke of indignation that Reese thought he might not have triple checked when he replied “Quite.”. “Well, then it just wants you to stay here. Maybe it thinks it’s too dangerous for you in particular for some reason or someone might recognize you.” “No, Mr.Reese i have looked through everyone that is currently holding a ticket to the flight, presuming no one who would pose a personal threat has yet to buy one. I...have a feeling the machine’s warning was for you.”

“Then why not send it to my phone instead of yours?” Reese wasn’t particularly worried. The machine seemed to have decided on it’s own to be more protective of he and Finch and that suited John fine, so long as it no longer appeared to be holding numbers back. Perhaps this was a case it had initially considered holding back but after Finch had...well..chastised it is all John could call the lecture the older man had gone on to a room empty aside from the two of them and a dog in the general direction of a web camera enabled laptop the machine had thought better and sent the number with it’s recommendation to leave it alone. Finch’s voice was the dry that Reese sometimes tried to get as a reaction; he heard it as amusement with some characteristic of John’s that Finch may not have tolerated from someone else. “Have you checked your phone since this morning, Mr.Reese.” No...he’d not gotten into the habit of checking it despite the Machine’s recently more ‘vocal’ habits. “My hands are full with breakfast you skip if i don’t bring any in, harold.”.

He moved the donut box to be held between his arm and stomach, setting the cups on top balanced on top of each other and under his chin as he dug the cell out of his inner jacket pocket. A couple women passing by smiled unusually wide at him and he made an effort at a self deprecating one back as he unlocked the phone to a black screen with the word ‘STAY’ in white capital letters across it. “Yeah, Finch. Apparently it doesn’t want me out of country.” The screen flicked back to his usual home screen but in the upper corner there was a blinking alert that an attachment had been sent. He opened it to see a picture of...Finch. There was a dotted box around him, half of it was yellow, half was red. The screen went back to black and the Machine messaged him “ADMIN MATCH” and then “NOT ADMIN” before it disappeared once more and left John staring at the picture again.   
“Mr.Reese, did you hear me?”  
“Finch...I’m not asking for nothing but, do you have a brother?”  
“What, why?”  
“I’ll show you when i get there. What’d you say?”  
“I said that if you decide you are going to do this case i’m coming with you.”  
“Finch...i don’t think that’s a good idea.”   
“If the machine doesn’t want either of us going but you are anyway, we’d have better chances working together. I can’t very well keep us connected via cellphone at that distance and if the perpetrator has intentions to do something on the plane i may be able to disrupt a mechanically based plan that you would not.”  
“Yes but...answer my question?”  
“I was always an only child, Mr. Reese.”   
“Fine, we’ll consider you going.”

John Reese had spent enough time in the field to see things unexplainable. Most soldiers might tell you they had religious experiences or the more sceptical might at least cop to the surreality that happens in combat as well as some of the ridiculousness that is outside of combat. Times spent waiting for orders that put your life at risk while having to do the mundane and fight off boredom every other hour lends itself to a strange perspective. Add to that some of the absolute nonsense bureaucracy safe behind a desk 12 times removed from your position demands and there will always be stories of unreal experiences. 

That's not what john puts his experiences under. Even in the military he’d been recruited from soldier duty to black ops unusually quickly and managed to stay alive for the inexperience far more often than he should have managed. That is to say, sometimes he didn’t manage to escape alive and yet, here he was ‘retired’ and carrying pink frosted and sprinkled donuts while balancing a coffee and a tea on the sidewalk of new york city. John had yet to figure out how much Finch truly knew about his clandestine and CIA career despite the man’s proclamation of ‘everything’ during their first meeting. He did know Finch blamed his tech for what happened in Ordos and he wasn’t entirely amiss. John had no doubts that the laptop contained part of the IFT code that’d shaped the machine they worked for now, but there was far more to it. 

John had seen the eyes of the man Kara shot, the only one alive; they’d been blood red and not just bloodshot but a sickening shade covering the whites all the way to the pinpoint pupil. It hadn’t been the first time he’d seen similar things either. He didn’t know the exact terms one would refer to in such matters, he had the vague feeling that what he’d seen had given rise to the world’s religions he just couldn’t ascribe the same explanations to it himself. When he’d died he’d not seen or felt anything, it’d been pain and then nothing until there was pain again. It wasn’t just that, the things he’d seen seemed detached from humanity but perfectly sentient in nature - he knew that from Kara. 

There was once, after a botched op that had her captured and evidently tortured for close to ten hours when she’d been just a little softer around her edges, just a little more...human. She’d said the job didn’t just change you, it took from you until something else filled the emptiness. That something wasn’t her, she claimed. It kept her going and she felt grateful for whatever it was, but it wasn’t her. She’d long ago let it take her, use her, be her because she was tired and if not for it she would have retired herself a long time ago. The next morning Kara had been back to normal but when she rose from bed, seeming healed far more than she should she’d shoved him against the wall and stared at him tight lipped, her eyes were the same color as always, but something was different too - like the pattern had changed. The message was no less clear for being unspoken; i am here, i am not leaving.

Then there was Snow; he’d never seemed like Kara, hollowed out and replaced but he was different in his own way. He seemed to have a surrounding power, aura. It was - all things considered - gentler than Kara was but it was insistent like a constant request ‘let me in, let me decide, trust me’ and John had to a degree. Mark had been a best friend as much as people in their position could be. He’d trusted Mark more than Kara but he never took for granted how much they were taking from him. He knew, before the end, what his partner had meant by being emptied out, everything good seemed to have been taken from him and all that was left was the job,the duty and Mark and Kara. They seemed ever more dangerous - predators pacing in the grass for a wound to take down their prey and John knew deep in his bones that the other in them would find a home in him as well if he died again.

All those things, they didn’t really affect his life in the larger picture. They were more determined to kill him in Ordos maybe because of it, but he doubted it would be any different knowing what that code had become, what it could do in less concerned hands. If anything it just gave him a deeper appreciation of his position and current job. Finch held power over him, in more ways than one the man was someone who had a gravitational pull all his own. It was in his intelligence and his kindness, his manner and compunction. The wealth always shown in taste didn’t hurt even though John was sure the other would still hold the mysterious gravitas in jeans and a tshirt though he’s not sure he could picture it. But all of that, and every bit of pull he had on John was inexorably human. Human and good. Beyond the debts he owed Finch and even beyond the friendship that had fast formed between them John would do anything to be close to that goodness, as it ever so slowly seemed to fill up the empty space in him that he was afraid the monsters would crawl inside of.


End file.
